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The poet Tennyson emerged as a conflicted spirit. He even composed a verse named The Two Voices, where two facets of his personality contemplated the pros and cons of self-destruction. Within this insightful volume, the biographer elects to spotlight on the more obscure identity of the writer.

A Pivotal Year: The Mid-Century

During 1850 became crucial for the poet. He unveiled the great verse series In Memoriam, for which he had toiled for nearly a long period. As a result, he emerged as both famous and rich. He got married, after a 14‑year relationship. Earlier, he had been living in temporary accommodations with his relatives, or lodging with bachelor friends in London, or living by himself in a rundown dwelling on one of his home Lincolnshire's desolate beaches. Now he took a home where he could host prominent callers. He assumed the role of poet laureate. His existence as a renowned figure started.

Even as a youth he was commanding, even charismatic. He was very tall, unkempt but handsome

Ancestral Challenges

The Tennyson clan, observed Alfred, were a “given to dark moods”, meaning prone to temperament and sadness. His parent, a unwilling minister, was volatile and frequently drunk. Occurred an occurrence, the details of which are vague, that resulted in the domestic worker being fatally burned in the rectory kitchen. One of Alfred’s brothers was placed in a psychiatric hospital as a youth and lived there for life. Another experienced profound despair and copied his father into drinking. A third fell into opium. Alfred himself experienced periods of paralysing gloom and what he called “strange episodes”. His work Maud is voiced by a insane person: he must often have pondered whether he could become one personally.

The Intriguing Figure of Early Tennyson

Even as a youth he was striking, even magnetic. He was exceptionally tall, unkempt but attractive. Before he adopted a black Spanish cloak and wide-brimmed hat, he could control a space. But, being raised hugger-mugger with his brothers and sisters – three brothers to an attic room – as an mature individual he sought out isolation, withdrawing into stillness when in company, retreating for lonely walking tours.

Existential Fears and Upheaval of Belief

In Tennyson’s lifetime, geologists, astronomers and those early researchers who were starting to consider with the naturalist about the origin of species, were introducing appalling questions. If the timeline of life on Earth had started eons before the arrival of the humanity, then how to believe that the earth had been made for people's enjoyment? “It seems impossible,” stated Tennyson, “that all of existence was only made for us, who reside on a insignificant sphere of a third-rate sun The recent optical instruments and magnifying tools uncovered areas infinitely large and creatures tiny beyond perception: how to keep one’s belief, given such findings, in a divine being who had made mankind in his form? If prehistoric creatures had become extinct, then might the mankind do so too?

Repeating Themes: Sea Monster and Bond

The biographer binds his account together with a pair of persistent elements. The primary he introduces at the beginning – it is the symbol of the mythical creature. Tennyson was a youthful student when he composed his verse about it. In Holmes’s view, with its combination of “Norse mythology, “earlier biology, “futuristic ideas and the biblical text”, the short sonnet presents ideas to which Tennyson would keep returning. Its impression of something vast, unutterable and mournful, concealed beyond reach of investigation, prefigures the mood of In Memoriam. It represents Tennyson’s emergence as a master of metre and as the creator of symbols in which dreadful unknown is compressed into a few dazzlingly suggestive words.

The second theme is the contrast. Where the imaginary creature epitomises all that is gloomy about Tennyson, his relationship with a genuine figure, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would say “I had no truer friend”, conjures all that is loving and lighthearted in the artist. With him, Holmes reveals a facet of Tennyson seldom before encountered. A Tennyson who, after uttering some of his grandest lines with ““odd solemnity”, would unexpectedly chuckle heartily at his own gravity. A Tennyson who, after seeing ““the companion” at home, wrote a appreciation message in rhyme describing him in his flower bed with his pet birds sitting all over him, planting their ““reddish toes … on arm, palm and leg”, and even on his crown. It’s an image of pleasure perfectly tailored to FitzGerald’s great exaltation of hedonism – his interpretation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also evokes the brilliant foolishness of the pair's mutual friend Edward Lear. It’s gratifying to be told that Tennyson, the melancholy renowned figure, was also the muse for Lear’s poem about the old man with a whiskers in which “a pair of owls and a fowl, four larks and a small bird” made their homes.

An Engaging {Biography|Life Story|